"Ordinary" Consciousness

If the anatomy of a human brain is unremarkable, if its physiology is operating within “normal” limits, if it is awake, not under the influence of intoxicants (or excessive stimulants) of any kind, functioning under “normal” conditions, and if it displays a particular electrochemical balance, we would say that the human in question is experiencing “ordinary” consciousness. I put the words ordinary and normal in quotation marks because the words themselves are so ambiguous and the definitions of them so open to individual interpretation.

Broadly speaking, when we say a human brain is operating “normally”, it is operating in such a way as to allow a human to perceive enough of reality to avoid dangerous stimuli, navigate their way through spacetime, recognize and interact with others, and generally interpret the world in a way that seems to be consistent with the human definition of reality. This is the “window” through which a human perceives the physical and social world, the window through which we experience our mediated contact with the free-standing reality.  It is this somewhat precarious (and exceedingly complex) physiological and electrochemical state that creates what humans call “ordinary” experience or “ordinary” consciousness. Human civilization has been created by humans who were in some approximation of this state. It is what most humans would consider an everyday experience. (See the chapter entitled Some (Brief) Comments On the Brain’s Anatomy and Physiology and the chapter entitled The Emergence and Nature of Human Consciousness, Part One: Toward a Definition of Consciousness).

Expanding on this, it may be said that “ordinary” consciousness contributes to the sense that life as one is living it is “normal”, the way “regular” or “ordinary” people live it. This sense of normality, by the way, is one of the consequences of having assimilated a particular culture. A person might think, if they were to put it into words, “I am calm, my mind is essentially unexcited, relatively clear, and I am not in overt physical distress. The life I am surrounded by is utterly mundane, completely ordinary in every way. This is what it’s like to be normal.” Ordinary consciousness, therefore, is not only one of the foundations of human social life and basic human interaction. The sense of normality it provides is also one of the foundations of human personal identity.

This sense of the ordinary also makes many people less conducive to any drastic changes in the routine way of life they experience—it wouldn’t be normal to change things. The introduction of rapid change or extreme novelty threatens the internal equilibrium of a great many people. Further, it can be argued that this sense that one’s own culture is the definition of normal can easily morph into belief in the superiority of one’s culture, and active hostility toward foreign ways of life, which are despised and shunned because they are “abnormal” or “perverse”.

Ordinary consciousness tends to gravitate between focusing on the external world of task completion, social interaction, and perception of surroundings, and the internal world of random mental events, internal narratives, fantasies (either positive or negative) and reveries. It is probable that most people are not focusing 100% of their attention on whatever task is at hand, except in the most pressing circumstances, e.g., life and death situations that demand undivided attention, or in situations in which they are communicating with large numbers of other people.  It is this constant sliding back and forth between inside and outside and the continual mixing of elements from the two that seems to constitute the ordinary internal reality that most people experience. What people call ordinary consciousness is, for most humans, the baseline against which exceptional or extraordinary states of mind may be measured.

In previous chapters we have discussed the nature of consciousness itself, but it would be useful to remind ourselves of how ordinary levels of attentiveness and awareness are maintained:

The exact neuronal connections that modulate alertness, wakefulness, and normal sleep and drowsiness are not well defined. A distinct group of neurons, the reticular formation, is located in the periventricular areas of the midbrain, pons, and medulla. [Note from the NIH: the periventricular area is the area around the ventricles where nerve fibers carry messages from the brain to the body's muscles.] In addition to modulating various interconnecting pathways within the brainstem, this group of neurons relates to the levels of alertness and wakefulness. It is postulated that a diffuse group of neuronal connections emanates from this reticular formation, projecting up the midbrain into the thalamic structures and then on to the cortex. This system is referred to as the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS). The ARAS receives input from all sensory systems, and efferent connections are extensive. It is thought that this system is responsible for modulating alertness and sleep. As such, any interruption of this system could result in alteration in the level of consciousness (or in abnormalities in the sleep cycle).¹

The brain therefore acts to keep a human in equilibrium, keeping the conscious mind sufficiently focused on the outer world that the human in question can function within normal limits.

So of what does a mind in an “ordinary” state go through in a day? A prominent psychologist, the late Robert E. Ornstein (from whom I borrowed the title of this chapter), gave his answer in The Psychology of Consciousness. He stated that the ordinary stream of consciousness was marked by “a mixture of thoughts, fantasies, ideas, and sensations of the external world.” A human encounters objects and other humans (typically), the latter of which have distinctive appearances, voices, and personalities. Humans move through three-dimensional spacetime, regularly manipulating objects, and turning their attention to tasks or communicating with others. He also emphasized that humans seem to make a common mistake: they see their own personal consciousness as “objective reality”.²

Ornstein emphasizes the following aspects of ordinary consciousness:

1.  The senses and the brain reduce the amount of information we receive and (as we have seen) detect only a part of the energies and chemical compounds around us.

2. Ordinary consciousness is heavily interactive and constructive. Humans receive sensory input and unconsciously organize it. This process is called categorization. These categories tend to be limited and less complex than the input the senses are receiving. If the categories are applied to other humans, all the actions of these humans tend to be seen through the lens of these categories.

3. Ordinary consciousness is shifting and fluid, and we tend to focus on any physical need we happen to have at a given moment. It is affected by cultural influences, personal loyalties, family background, personal history, education, particular interests, and many other factors. It can be confined to a narrow area of interest or narrow regions of the world. It can be shaped by the degree to which an individual employs verbal modes of thought as opposed to image-driven modes.

4.  Our consciousness is not a simple passive recorder of external stimuli but is a deeply selective and evolved entity aimed primarily at biological survival. 

5.  Our consciousness grows and develops as our knowledge of the world expands. From the chaotic and unstructured consciousness of infancy, we gradually acquire familiarity with the objects and processes around us, allowing us to form a coherent picture of the reality around us and to gain survival skills.

There are some people, often artists of various kinds, who see ordinary consciousness as a barrier to unconventional thought. The writer Virginia Wolff put it this way:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.⁴

Brain Sludge

The curious phrase brain sludge is my way of rephrasing the important fact that Virginia Wolff so elegantly expressed above: much of what our ordinary, everyday consciousness feeds us is a random hodge-podge of fleeting blurry images, spontaneous inner “sounds” (either voices, music, or nature sounds), temporary bursts of emotion, wordless impulses, irrelevant, surprising, painful, or long-lost memories, imaginary scenarios (sometimes violent or erotic), snippets of verbal thought, and strange mixtures of all of these phenomena. This sludge comprises the background of our ordinary waking life. Too many of us consider the contents of this sludgy river to be important, especially if we have had strange or disturbing thoughts. Almost none of them are. It is the conscious brain’s static. When we concentrate on some matter at hand, this sludge is pushed off to the side, so to speak, but it always has the potential to interfere with more necessary tasks. It can interrupt our reading, invade our mealtimes, interfere with our rest, and distract us from our work (which, admittedly, is not always a bad thing). The river of brain sludge has been with us our entire lives. It is the most prominent feature of our consciousness in some ways. So when we consider William James’s formulation “the stream of thought”, we need to remember that much, or even most of that stream, is clogged with sludge.

In the broadest sense, the whole of our past experiences is present at any given moment, but particular aspects of that experience take precedence. And in that present moment in our “ordinary” consciousness, there are more realities unfolding and expressing themselves than we are capable of knowing or understanding. When we realize this, we realize there is nothing “ordinary” about our consciousness at all.

 

 1.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK380/

2.  Ornstein, Robert. The Psychology of Consciousness. New York: Penguin Books, 1984, p. 32.

3.  Ornstein, pp. 32-62

4.  https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10733324-examine-for-a-moment-an-ordinary-mind-on-an-ordinary

 

 

 

Intelligence

 Humans, the most numerous large land animal on Earth, exercise an extensive but limited dominance over the surface of the planet’s crust. In the two million or so years in which their genus has existed, they have spread over the Earth’s continents, and have adapted to an astounding array of different environments. The evolution of Homo Sapiens some 250,000-300,000 ybp saw a vast expansion of human knowledge and skills, an expansion which has made humans—at least temporarily—the most advanced species in the biosphere. Through means of society and culture, humans have passed what they have learned (or think they have learned) to those born after them.

The human ability to learn is extraordinary, as we have just seen. Many factors, of course, affect this ability. Key among these is intelligence, one of the more complex subjects in human psychology. It is human intelligence that has given our species the ultimate advantage over the rest of Kingdom Animalia. But the definition of this trait, and the study of how individual humans come to possess it, are areas riven by disputes.

The Many Definitions of Intelligence

In its broadest definition, intelligence might be thought of as the ability to understand a situation, recognize challenges and problems that may be associated with that situation, and take appropriate action in a timely manner to deal with them. (That appropriate action can sometimes be to do nothing.) A team of brain researchers has given a more formal definition:

…‘intelligence’ can be understood as mental or behavioural flexibility or the ability of an organism to solve problems occurring in its natural and social environment, culminating in the appearance of novel solutions that are not part of the animal's normal repertoire. This includes forms of associative learning and memory formation, behavioural flexibility and innovation rate, as well as abilities requiring abstract thinking, concept formation and insight.¹

It should be noted immediately that there is no universally accepted definition of intelligence. (One indefatigable researcher has found no fewer than 71 different definitions.)² A prominent neuroscientist has noted that most definitions center around the concept of problem solving. As he puts it, “More complex problems require higher levels of intelligence. For example, it requires more intelligence to be able to solve differential equations than simply to be able to add two single-digit numbers.”³  It should also be noted that the definition of intelligence is not limited solely to the ability to master academic subjects. Intelligence has much broader applications.

In 1983 the American psychologist Howard Gardner published his theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner saw nine specialized forms of intelligence, or areas in which different sets of intellectual skills were required. They are as follows:

Verbal-linguistic intelligence

Logical-mathematical intelligence

Spatial-visual intelligence (the ability to think in pictures and visualize possibilities)

Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (particular to athletics)

Musical intelligences

Interpersonal intelligence (the ability to relate effectively to others)

Intrapersonal (self-examination)

Naturalist intelligence (recognizing and categorizing elements of the natural world)

Existential intelligence (the ability to think about “big” issues)⁴

Gardner’s ideas have come under criticism from many sources. Some see Gardner’s categories as simply a list of different talents people have with the word “intelligence” tied to them. Others contend that Gardner’s ideas are not truly scientific but are rather a neuromyth. One critic defines the term neuromyth as “a commonly accepted but unscientific claim about brain function.”⁵ Gardner’s work, in her view, was based on an understanding of the brain’s physiology that has been superseded, and that his hypothesis is not supported by empirical data.

Gardner’s MI theory was not a neuromyth initially because it was based on theories of the 1980s of brain modularity for cognition, and few researchers then were concerned by the lack of validating brain studies. However, in the past 40 years neuroscience research has shown that the brain is not organized in separate modules dedicated to specific forms of cognition.⁶

I think it would therefore be fair to say that Gardner identified various ways that intelligence is manifested rather than distinct kinds of intelligence that arise from areas of the brain dedicated to these manifestations.

There is a distinction between crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. This idea was first formulated by the psychologist Raymond Cattell in 1943. To put it succinctly, crystallized intelligence is the sum of what one has learned and one’s ability to bring this knowledge to bear when required. Fluid intelligence is the ability to deal with novel problems and new situations, situations in which previously learned information cannot be applied. In Cattel’s view, crystallized intelligence can be increased throughout adult life (unless senescence ends this accumulation of knowledge) while fluid intelligence is most critical in childhood and adolescence and plateaus in young adulthood.⁷

Neural Correlates of Intelligence

A great deal of research has been done to determine which areas of the human brain are most closely associated with intelligence. Two brain researchers in the UK, referring to the contention “that the cognitive basis of intelligence is the ability to make fluid or creative analogical relationships between distantly related concepts or pieces of information”⁸, decided to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine subjects engaged in tasks requiring the ability to make analogies. Their findings:

An analysis using covariates determined per subject by analogical depth revealed significant bilateral neural activations in the superior, inferior, and middle frontal gyri and in the anterior cingulate/paracingulate cortex. These frontal areas have been previously associated with reasoning tasks involving inductive syllogisms, syntactic hierarchies, and linguistic creativity.⁹

In 2009, a team of neurologists from UCLA published an overview of the ways in which advanced scanning technologies can be used to ascertain intelligence levels in humans. Based on their wide-ranging, multi-sourced research, they attempted to identify those anatomical features of the brain that affect the level of an individual’s intelligence. These scientists stressed that what they were observing were correlations, and that conclusions about the relationship between the brain’s anatomy and human intelligence remain speculative. With these caveats in mind, what factors and brain regions may have an influence on intelligence? One of these is overall brain volume, with important reservations. It is the authors’ opinion that “increased global brain volumes observed in more intelligent individuals may be accounted for by selectively enlarged volumes in brain regions especially relevant for higher cognitive function”.¹⁰ Other regions and factors include the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes, the hippocampus, the cerebellum, significant volumes of gray matter (particularly in the lateral and medial frontal cortex), cortical thickness, and the thickness of the corpus callosum.¹¹

General Indicators of Intelligence

The rapidity, accuracy, and/or scope of one’s situational awareness, comprehension, knowledge base, and logical abilities are measurable aspects of intelligence, although the methods used to measure them are sometimes controversial. (This discussion is not the place to examine the controversies over these measures.) As we saw, Gardner’s neuromyth gives us an overview of the ways in which humans exhibit intelligence. Looking more deeply, we can say that the ability of a human brain to deal with abstract ideas and the language needed to express them, the ability to command language in general and use it effectively, the ability to reasonably predict immediate outcomes of actions, the ability to apply reason and precedent to novel or unexpected situations, the ability to conceive of possible realities and assess the degree of their probability, the ability to focus on the most salient aspects of a situation or problem, and the ability to adapt quickly to a given set of circumstances are, I think, the foundations of our intellectual prowess.

Overall, the meta-talent of the human species is, as I have already said, its adaptability. Not all individuals will display this quality, but as a collectivity, our ability to change with changing circumstances has been our most vital survival asset. Human intelligence gives us a vast superiority over most living things. Humans, as a group, can often change in something very close to real time (when measured in geological terms). Most living things can only change in evolutionary time, meaning that the processes of natural selection and genetic drift must act with their characteristic slowness to allow them to adapt. Moreover, human intelligence can deal with an impressive variety of challenges. As we have seen, many animals exhibit intelligence. But it is the range and depth of human intelligence that has given us our limited power over the biosphere.

Intelligence, Both Heritable and Malleable

In Volume One (p. 433) we saw there is evidence that, to a degree, intelligence is heritable. The fact of intelligence’s heritability is not really in question, but rather the degree to which it is heritable and the role of environmental/cultural factors in the shaping of intellect. Two neuroscientists researching this issue have arrived at a conclusion that I think warrants attention. They contend that intelligence is the result of the interaction of genetic and environmental factors.

The high heritability of intelligence could have emerged from independent genetic effects, while its high malleability could have arisen from independent environmental effects. However, in isolation, these possibilities have little explanatory value. Accordingly, since intelligence is demonstrably malleable, independent genetic effects cannot possibly run the show. Likewise, since intelligence is demonstrably heritable, independent environmental effects cannot possibly run the show. This leads us to the conclusion that gene-environment interplay is the ring master. [My emphasis.]While seemingly straight-forward, this conclusion has been sublimated by methodological/conceptual biases (the first dibs to genetics) and its elusive nature (the hidden iceberg of interactions). Here, we have presented evidence that the GE solution is theoretically and empirically sound, even though at first glance it seems improbable. Paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes’ maxim: since we have eliminated the now implausible options, whatever remains, however well hidden, must be the truth (or at least a closer approximation).¹²

There has been extensive research done on the degree of genetic influence on intelligence, and although research methodologies have been improved, there is still no definitive answer to the (perhaps meaningless) question, “What is the exact percentage of intelligence accounted for by genetic influences?” A pair of scientists in the UK have looked deeply at this issue, and they report the following:

A.  The degree of heritability is not fixed, but rather increases in a linear fashion over time. It rises from about 20% in infancy to 60% in adulthood. What seems to account for this is something known as genetic amplification. This is to say that genetic propensities in children are amplified by the ways in which these children arrange and organize their environment. The implication, in my view, is that as people mature, and the ways in which they arrange their environments become more elaborate, the more indicative of their genetic inheritance these arrangements become.

B. Genetic differences in intelligence are largely attributable to those genes that influence cognitive abilities such as vocabulary, memory, and the brain’s executive functions. These genes display a high level of pleiotropy [when a single gene can have multiple effects].

C.  Assortative mating has a major impact on intelligence levels. Assortative mating is the tendency of people to marry and mate with people who are similar to them. On the scale in which 0.00 equals no correlation and 1.00 equals absolute correlation, assortative mating for intelligence is about 0.40 for intelligence generally and about 0.50 for verbal intelligence. (By way of comparison, the correlation for height and weight is about 0.20.) Interestingly, there is about a 0.60 correlation for years of education. Further, inbreeding has a negative effect on intelligence.¹³

If, indeed, environmental factors play a role in intelligence, what factors seem to be the most significant ones? A team of medical researchers in India, after studying a large sample of children, came to these conclusions:

In the present study, we found that various environmental factors such as place of residence, physical exercise, family income, parents' occupation and education influence the IQ of a child to a great extent. Hence, a child must be provided with an optimal environment to be able to develop to his/her full genetic potential.¹⁴

Research indicates that adequate early childhood nutrition is an important factor in good cognitive development.¹⁵ The educational level of parents is a factor in their children’s cognitive development.¹⁶ Family stability is also key. A Princeton University study indicates that stability is a major factor in cognitive development. Interestingly, an unstable two parent home is not as good in this regard as a stable single-parent home.¹⁷

It should also be noted that research finds no significant difference between the intelligence of women and that of men. Further, the assertion that one “race” (a specious term, in my view) is naturally intellectually superior to others, is an idea that finds no broad scientific support.¹⁸ And it bears repeating that the assertion that humans “only use 10% of their brain” is complete nonsense.

The Critical Junctures in the Rise of Human Intelligence

In tracing the evolution of the anatomically modern human, the evolution of the human brain, and the rise and manifestations of human consciousness, we have largely traced the rise of human intelligence. Those studying these phenomena have looked for certain critical junctures in the history of intellect’s development. We have already come across Merlin Donald’s hypothesis about the significance of self-triggered recall and rehearsal loop in the evolution of memory (pp. 617-618). As I have already noted, tool making gave a selective advantage to imaginative thinking. Human social life’s increasing complexity worked in a reciprocal way with the evolution of the brain, and the advent of gestural and vocal communication gave a strong selective advantage to those who mastered these skills. We can say that the transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens (taking into account the crucial offshoot from erectus of Homo heidelbergensis, the African variant of which might be the true precursor to sapiens) was the biggest juncture of all in the development of human intelligence. We face the world with, essentially, the same sensory and cognitive apparatus with which a Homo sapiens tribe in prehistoric Ethiopia or southern Africa faced it.

Human intelligence was also affected by the oral history and storyteller traditions, which put a premium on training the memory, and the rise of written symbols and the storage of information outside of the human body. Research indicates that reading and writing use existing brain structures, repurposing them. Stanislas Dehaene explains this:

…new cultural inventions such as writing are only possible inasmuch as they fit within our preexisting brain architecture. Each cultural object must find its neuronal niche—a set of circuits that are sufficiently close to the required function and sufficiently plastic to be partially “recycled.” The theory stipulates that cultural inventions always involve the recycling of older cerebral structures that originally were selected by evolution to address very different problems but manage, more or less successfully, to shift toward a novel cultural use.

How can this view explain why all readers possess a specialized and reproducibly located area for a recent cultural invention? The idea is that the act of reading is tightly constrained by the preexisting brain architectures for language and vision. The human brain is subject to strong anatomical and connectional constraints inherited from its evolution, and the crossing of these multiple constraints implies that reading acquisition is channeled to an essentially unique circuit.¹⁹

The evidence shows that even under the constraints imposed by the need to repurpose existing brain anatomy, reading can have a major impact on intelligence. Research on identical twins has revealed that reading improves both verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities in children.²⁰

Consequences of Intelligence

Our intelligence, as noted, has allowed us to dominate the other animal species, with consequences that are, in the long run, unpredictable. As we will examine more closely in the next volume of this work, human intelligence has created amazingly complex societies and cultures. But these societies and cultures also, almost paradoxically, display the limits and fallibility of human intelligence. Humans have created social and cultural entities that are utterly beyond their ability to fully understand. Individual humans very often find themselves struggling to navigate life in such societies, often overwhelmed by the contradictions and randomness they encounter. We have unintentionally created situations that may be beyond our ability to stabilize or correct. It is the sense among some of us that we will require a non-human intelligence to pull us out of these difficult situations that has given rise to machine “intelligence”—a move which might be even more dangerous than the situations the machines have been devised to rectify.

Moreover, humans have often tended to overestimate their own intelligence. This has led many of them to have an unwarranted sense of certainty. Others have been held back by deficiencies in their intellect, and have often been unfairly dealt with by those taking advantage of these deficiencies. Both in evolution and in everyday human life, intelligence is a survival advantage.

But our intelligence is not absolute, and everywhere we turn, we run into its limits. One of the ways the human mind tries to find these limits and gain control of complex situations is through the processes of reasoning. It is to the operations of reasoning we now turn, mindful that even the most patiently reasoned chains of thought can lead us in unexpected directions—or even dead ends.

1.   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4685590/

2.   https://calculemus.org/lect/08szt-intel/materialy/Definitions%20of%20Intelligence.html

3.  Lee, Daeyeol. Birth of Intelligence: From RNA to Artificial Intelligence (p. 4). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition

4.    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811905000819

5.    https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1217288/full

6.    https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1217288/full

7.    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11595727/

8.    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811905000819

9.    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811905000819

10.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2770698/

11.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2770698/

12.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5754247/

13.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4270739/

14.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5479093/

15.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8839299/

16.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289621000817

17. “Family Structure and Stability Effects on Child Cognitive Performance”. Terry-Ann Craigie Center for Research on Child Wellbeing Office of Population Research Princeton University December 31, 2009

18. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silicon-valley-is-reviving-the-discredited-and-discriminatory-idea-of-race/

19.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3704307/

20.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4354297/#sec11

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning

 The human ability to gather, interpret, and remember aspects of the reality in which they find themselves immersed, and of which they are a part, is key to the survival of both individual humans and the species itself. The acquisition of knowledge includes not only the gathering of facts but also the acquisition of skills necessary for the acquisition of more facts and the performance of tasks which call for the use of these facts. In general terms, the more information a human possesses, and the more skills that human commands, the greater the likelihood of survival and the possibility of reproductive success. The possession of facts and skills allows for an emergent phenomenon to manifest itself in a human mind: a concept of the world and a (partial) understanding of the processes by which it works. The growth of a human’s knowledge and skills base is the general definition of the term learning. The ability of a human to bring this knowledge and these skills to bear in given situations is of crucial importance to that human’s general well-being. As we will soon see, learning involves physical alterations of the brain itself. These alterations manifest themselves as changes in the density of connections between neurons and the establishment of new neuronal pathways, pathways which facilitate the recall of learned knowledge and methods of applying it in real-life situations. Memory and learning are therefore closely connected.

 The Physiology of Learning

 As we have already noted, learning is intimately connected to memory. It is ultimately another example of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to physically modify itself. We should note that a full picture of how the brain’s neurons are modified by memory and learning (two of the foundations of cognition) is still being pieced together. Remarkable progress has nonetheless been made in this area in recent times. Technological advances have greatly facilitated this progress. The aim of this research is to understand how patterns of neuronal excitation and inhibition (what neuroscientists refer to as the E:I balance), in combination with patterns of gene expression, cause neuroplasticity to occur. It should be said that inhibition comes from a variety of sources and this has an effect on particular circuits.¹

 The fundamental principle, as we have seen in our examinations of consciousness and memory, is that experience has the ability to cause physical alterations within the brain’s neural circuitry. What is the process by which this happens? First, there must be some form of stimulus that reaches an individual’s senses. As we have seen, this stimulus is converted by the process of sensory transduction into electrical impulses which are then processed in the brain’s association areas. We briefly touched on Associative Memory in the chapter on memory. Now, we will look at those regions of the brain that neuroscientists call the association areas. We looked at these in a general way in our brief introduction to cognition. Now, we will examine their more specific components. Some of these areas are involved with the relationship between stimulus and motor response. Others are primarily oriented toward the processing of language and other symbolic forms of communication.

 Two specialists in brain research characterize the association area in the following manner:

 …higher-order association cortex is characterized by connectivity to association zones located in widely distributed positions throughout the cortex. Association regions in one zone of cortex (e.g. the inferior parietal lobule) will receive and send projections to zones of temporal, prefrontal, and midline association cortex.²

 In effect, the association areas of the brain form a network. As we have already seen, the formation of neural networks among and between cortical areas is a fundamental feature of the human brain. Two Harvard neuroscientists have hypothesized that during the evolution of the brain, the expansion of the association cortex “may have allowed for an archetype distributed network to fractionate into multiple specialized networks.” It is these specialized networks, they contend, that support the various higher order cognitive processes, including language.³

 A neuroscientist studying learning has identified these brain structures as part of the association regions: the medial temporal lobe (especially the hippocampus), motor regions of the frontal lobe (which are crucial in associating visual stimulus with motor response), the prefrontal cortex (also involved in linking visual stimulus to response), and the striatum.⁴ A pair of neuroscientists at Yale describe the striatum as follows:

 The striatum is a critical component of the brain that controls motor, reward, and executive function. This ancient and phylogenetically-conserved structure forms a central hub where rapid instinctive, reflexive movements and behaviors in response to sensory stimulation or the retrieval of emotional memory intersect with slower planned motor movements and rational behaviors…The convergence of excitatory glutamatergic activity from the thalamus and cortex, along with dopamine release in response to novel stimulation, provide the basis for motor learning, reward seeking, and habit formation.⁵

 In regard to those regions of the cortex involved in learning and using language, physiologists have identified regions of the brain’s left hemisphere involved in these processes.

 From different overviews…it is clear that the language-relevant cortex includes Broca's area in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), Wernicke's area in the superior temporal gyrus (STG), as well as parts of the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and the inferior parietal and angular gyrus in the parietal lobe. Within these macroanatomically defined regions, microanatomical subregions can be specified.⁶

More broadly, the physiology of the brain’s language centers allows for language acquisition, the learning of a language. We will examine these structures more closely in the chapter Speech and the Evolution of Language.

As we noted in this chapter’s introduction, learning causes changes in neural interconnectedness. Now we will focus more intently on the processes by which this occurs. We should emphasize that in learning it is the synapse itself that is being strengthened. A psychology professor and brain researcher has explained the phenomenon as follows:

The connections between neurons, through the synapses, however, are constantly changing throughout all of our life and are predominantly responsible for learning and memory in the brain. These changes in connections involve forming new connections, known as synaptogenesis, or strengthening existing connections, known as long-term potentiation (LTP)…

The researcher goes on to say that in laboratory experiments with rats, the rats’ synapses can form “more extensive interconnections between their neurons…with a greater number of synapses” when the rats are given suitable stimulation.⁷

Further, he points to a critical fact: when multiple neurons respond to a stimulus at the same time, the connections between them are strengthened, a hypothesis first proposed by the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb.

 …Hebb described an important process for learning in the brain, known as Hebbian learning (1949), summed up by the phrase, “neurons that fire together wire together...”Put simply, when two or more neurons respond or fire at the same time (i.e., from some thought, action, or event in the environment) the connection or synapse between them is strengthened, leading to a stronger association. This means that if some situation (or thought or action) is encountered in the future causing one of those neurons to respond, it will now be more likely to trigger a response in the other connected neurons, recalling and further reinforcing that association.⁸

What are the mechanisms of neuroplasticity? Neurogenesis, as we noted above, apoptosis, or programmed cell death, (which we encountered in Volume One), and degrees of synaptic change caused by activity or non-activity. To quote one brain researcher, “Repetitive stimulation of synapses can cause long‐term potentiation or long‐term depression of neurotransmission.” These changes can cause physical alterations in dendritic spines. They can also alter neuronal circuits, and with them, behavior. These processes appear to have a major impact on the brain’s ability to acquire new information, react to quickly changing external circumstances, or recover from injury.⁹

We noted above that gene expression is a factor in neuroplasticity. Specifically, what that means is that there is a reciprocal relationship between synaptogenesis and a person’s genes. Gene mutations can cause errors in synaptic formation. These synaptic errors can in turn hinder neurodevelopment and damage the brain’s normal functions, sometimes very seriously so.¹⁰ In turn, synaptic formations can affect the expression of genes. As one study puts it, “…studies indicate that neuronal activity regulates a complex program of gene expression involved in many aspects of neuronal development.”¹¹

In addition to Hebbian learning, researchers also investigate synaptic scaling. Synaptic scaling refers to the ability of a neuron’s synapses to adjust their rate of firing in order to maintain their homeostatic equilibrium. Research has shown that neurons use calcium-dependent sensors to detect fluctuations in their firing rates. These sensors then allow greater or lesser accumulations of receptors for glutamate (the chief excitatory neurotransmitter) in the synapse.¹² Synaptic scaling seems to be crucial for the storage of associative memories, specifically, the ability of a person to remember important aspects and details of particular events.¹³

In humans there is, of course a relationship between learning and development, a relationship that sheds light on neural plasticity. The human brain has mechanisms that deal with experience-expectant plasticity [neuronal development based on common or nearly universal experiences such as exposure to language], and experience-dependent plasticity [neuronal development specific to the experiences of an individual, development which facilitates the ability to learn throughout life, and development that strengthens or eliminates neural connections]. The two forms of plasticity are deeply intertwined and both influence each other. Experience-dependent plasticity tends to be greater in children than adults, but plasticity in adults takes place in a different context. As one researcher has put it,  

…modifying synapses that are already committed (e.g. learning a motor skill such as juggling) is very different than committing the synapse for the first time (e.g. learning the motor coordination necessary for the first time a baby holds himself up).¹⁴

Researchers are also exploring the structure of the neocortex itself to gain insight into the learning process. One team of researchers, noting the hierarchical arrangement of the regions of the neocortex and the arrangement of cortical neurons into columns, has proposed a hypothesis about how the brain learns to recognize objects. In their words,

We believe each cortical column learns a model of “its” world, of what it can sense. A single column learns the structure of many objects and the behaviors that can be applied to those objects. Through intra-laminar [within layers] and long-range cortical-cortical connections, columns that are sensing the same object can resolve ambiguity.¹⁵

So the sensory stimulus that begins the processes of learning undergoes complex processing in the brain. This processing physically transforms the brain itself. From this, a synergy arises. The more the brain’s synapses are strengthened and the more neuronal circuitry is expanded, the greater the ability of the brain to absorb additional learning, which in turn will cause new waves of synaptic transformation.

Forms of Learning

What are the general ways in which humans learn? Perhaps the most basic one is imitation. How might imitation be defined? One team of researchers has put it this way:

…we use the broadest and simplest definition of imitation as follows—we call an action imitation if there is a relationship between the behaviour of a copier and a model, such that observing the movements of the model causes the parts of the copier's body to move in the same way relative to one another as the parts of the model's body…

In their description of it, imitative behavior is variable. People can use various parts of their body to imitate, such as their hands and faces. They can also imitate using their voices. Their imitations vary in accuracy and can be imitations of things which are new to them or familiar in varying degrees. Imitations can be conscious actions, or they can be spontaneous. And the result of these imitations is unpredictable.¹⁶

In the study of imitation, a major debate is over the issue of when children begin to imitate the actions of others. One researcher in the field of early childhood development contends that no genuine imitation occurs in humans until early in their second year, and that claims of newborns engaging in imitation rest on preformationism, “the view that development is the growth of pre-formed complex structures”. She finds no convincing evidence to support preformationist ideas, and contends that:

…imitation will be the emergent, stable product of the coming together of a range of distinct kinds of knowledge and skill. Such multi-component systems are not deterministic and do not follow a built-in blueprint for the development of behaviours. They are self-organizing and can generate new behaviours through their own activity.¹⁷

And a team of experts in the study of child psychology finds that toddlers can use imitation to communicate with others and are can take steps to ensure others see their imitation.¹⁸

It goes without saying that the ability to imitate is deeply ingrained in the human brain. Brain researchers have identified specific regions of the brain that facilitate imitation.

[The] Human ability to imitate movements is instantiated in parietal, premotor and opercular structures, often referred to as the human homologue of the macaque mirror neuron system…Critically, the activity of the parietal opercula bilaterally was associated with the anatomical compatibility effect. [NB: The anatomical compatibility effect is when a physical response to an observed phenomenon appears to be the most appropriate one, a response that increases with repetition.]  Furthermore, increased activity of the left middle frontal gyrus and right superior temporal sulcus (extending to the temporo-parietal junction) was found in those trials in which the spatial mapping between the seen and executed movements was detrimental for the anatomical task.¹⁹ 

Imitation plays a crucial role in language acquisition, as we will see in detail later. And in general imitation is so pervasive in the human experience that it may be the origin of human communication itself, a topic we will examine in a subsequent chapter.

Humans can also learn by means of conditioning. By conditioning we mean, in its most basic sense, a learned response to a given stimulus. Classical conditioning, also known as associative learning, means getting a subject to give a particular response to a neutral stimulus.  Operant conditioning is getting a subject to associate a given behavior with a specific consequence, either a reward or a punishment of some sort. Rewards naturally tend to increase the behaviors that result in them and punishments tend to decrease behaviors. These rewards or punishments are sometimes referred to as positive or negative reinforcement.

As is the case with imitation, conditioning is a pervasive feature of human life. (Operant conditioning governs much of child raising, for example.) One needn’t fall into the error of thinking that operant conditioning is the only factor that governs human behavior to see that in many cases it influences such behavior. But this influence always falls within a larger cognitive and experiential context.

In a later volume of this work, we will examine how the educational systems in human societies evolved and the methods by which they have attempted to build on the basic foundations of human learning.

The Relation Between Innate Behaviors and Learned Behaviors

There is a distinction between behaviors which require no learning process and those that do. Behaviors that require no learning are called innate. These are genetically-determined behaviors, such as reflexes or other bodily reactions to stimuli. Innate and learned behaviors are usually considered to be distinct, but in recent years many researchers have come to see them as deeply intertwined. There is evidence that certain neural circuits once considered to be innate demonstrate plasticity. It now seems certain that all complex behaviors are a synthesis of innate and learned behaviors, which shape each other in a synergistic fashion.²⁰ We will examine the relationship between genetic predisposition and experience in greater detail in a subsequent chapter.

It is sobering to remember that a great deal of what humans learn is utterly wrong. Humans learn “facts” (such as the belief that there was an actual Noah’s Ark) that bear no relationship to reality. They also learn prejudices. They learn ways to harm others. They learn bad habits and self-destructive behavior. My point is that learning is not always a benign thing, although in fact the vast majority of what humans learn is quite ordinary and mundane. But at its best learning exalts a human being, opening up realms of knowledge that transform them for the better, broaden their outlook on life and the world, give them skills which will prepare them for a variety of tasks, and help them to understand at least something about their place in reality. The learning process is vastly influenced by an individual’s intelligence. It is to the definition and nature of intelligence that we now turn, seeking in them clues to our success as a species. More darkly, we will see how the possession of intelligence is a two-edged sword, enabling us to dominate the world while at the same time giving us the power to destroy it.

1.    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627319308347

2.    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154621000772?via%3Dihub

3.    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154621000772#sec0015

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5.    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6656632/

6.    https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physrev.00006.2011#:~:text=From%20different%20overviews%20(67%2C%20118,gyrus%20in%20the%20parietal%20lobe%20(

7. https://solportal.ibe-unesco.org/wp-content/uploads/_pdfs/neuroplasticity-how-the-brain-changes-with-learning.pdf

8.   https://solportal.ibe-unesco.org/wp-content/uploads/_pdfs/neuroplasticity-how-the-brain-changes-with-learning.pdf

9.   https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6871182/

10. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5095804/

11. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2728073/#:~:text=Experience%2Ddriven%20synaptic%20activity%20causes,a%20variety%20of%20neurological%20disorders.

12.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2834419/

13.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221003638#:~:text=Here%2C%20we%20show%20that%20synaptic,memory%20formation%20and%20memory%20generalization.

14.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6871182/

15.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5661005/

16.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6175014/

17.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2865075/

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20.   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166223625000578

 

Trump and the Military: A Record of Lies and Destruction

 

A. Introduction

Donald Trump’s paternal grandfather, who had emigrated to the United States, tried to return to his native Germany in 1904 but was expelled because it was revealed he had avoided the required military service. Donald John Trump has continued that tradition. Moreover, he has lied about those in uniform, ridiculed them, and insulted them in a way no American “leader” ever has. He is the most viciously anti-military president in our history, despite his embrace of the military trappings of his office. Let’s plunge into his appalling and outrageous personal history in this area.

B. The Birth of Cadet Bone Spurs

Trump, from all accounts, was an ill-behaved child. Frustrated with his lack of personal discipline, after Donald's 8th grade year his parents shipped him off to New York Military Academy in the Hudson Valley. Trump appeared to thrive in the school's highly disciplined and structured regimen. It seemed to bring out his competitive nature as well. It was this period that convinced Trump he was some sort of military expert.

It was this attitude that caused The New York Daily News, after Trump had denigrated John McCain’s heroism, to ridicule Trump mercilessly:

Trump began his higher education in 1964 at Fordham University. In 1966 he transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It was during this period that Trump received four draft deferments on the basis of being a college student. After graduating from Wharton, Trump was re-classified as 1A in July 1968. An armed forces physical found him disqualified on the basis of bone spurs in his heels, which got him his fifth deferment. Later Trump got a high number in the draft lottery. Curiously, his supposed physical limitation didn't prevent Trump from participating in various sports, including golf, baseball, tennis, and squash.

C. Trump’s Personal Vietnam

Trump was quite the playboy and womanizer in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Trump later joked with radio personality Howard Stern about this time in his life. Here is a transcript of what was said:

STERN: Now getting back to dating, and when you got to say to a woman, you gotta go to my personal doctor and I’m gonna have you checked out, is that a tough thing to say to a woman?

TRUMP: It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world.  It is a dangerous world out there.  It’s like Vietnam, sort of.

STERN: Hey it’s your personal Vietnam isn’t it?

TRUMP: It is my personal Vietnam.  I feel like a great and very brave soldier! [My emphasis]

STERN: A lot of guys who went through Vietnam came out unscathed.  A lot of guys going through the 80’s having sex with different women came out with AIDS and all kinds of things.

TRUMP: This is better than Vietnam, but it’s uh… it’s more fun.

STERN: A little better, but every v****a is a landmine, haven’t we both said that in private?

TRUMP: [intense laughter] I think it is a potential landmine.  There’s some real danger there.

STERN: When you go to a bar, do you ever go with a fleet of doctors and have them check all the women, and then party with the uninfected?

TRUMP: [laughter] The few!  You mean the few uninfected!

D. Trump’s Anti-Military Attitude Deepens

Trump has also acted to prevent disabled veterans from vending outside his building on Fifth Avenue in New York:

“While disabled veterans should be given every opportunity to earn a living, is it fair to do so to the detriment of the city as a whole or its tax paying citizens and businesses?” Trump wrote in a 1991 letter to John Dearie, then-chairman of the state Assembly’s Committee on Cities.

“Do we allow Fifth Ave., one of the world’s finest and most luxurious shopping districts, to be turned into an outdoor flea market, clogging and seriously downgrading the area?” Trump demanded.

In 2004, Trump complained again:

"He complained in a letter to then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg that the ambiance of Fifth Ave. — the address of his gleaming Trump Tower headquarters — was being wrecked by peddlers, including some he accused of only posing as vets. [My emphasis]

This article from Politico is both eye-opening and infuriating. Former U.S. Marine Dan Rossi, a disabled veteran, remembering Trump’s attempt to destroy the livelihoods of people like him, said,

“He’s done more damage to the disabled veterans in this city than any other man.”

E. Trump and John McCain

I was not an admirer of John McCain’s politics, but I had nothing but respect for the terrible sacrifices he made and the horrific suffering he endured in Vietnam. McCain was held in captivity in North Vietnam for 5 and one-half years. He was offered a chance to leave early (because his father was an admiral) but he refused. He underwent shockingly brutal treatment, including beatings, torture, and solitary confinement. At one point McCain’s weight dropped to 95 pounds. A brief account:

Less than a year into McCain's imprisonment, his father was named commander of US forces in the Pacific, and the North Vietnamese saw an opportunity for leverage by offering the younger McCain's release — what would have been both a propaganda victory and a way to demoralize other American POWs.

But McCain refused, sticking to the POW code of conduct that says troops must accept release in the order in which they are captured.

"I knew that every prisoner the Vietnamese tried to break, those who had arrived before me and those who would come after me, would be taunted with the story of how an admiral's son had gone home early, a lucky beneficiary of America's class-conscious society," McCain later recalled.

The North Vietnamese reacted with fury and escalated McCain's torture.

McCain soon reached what he would later describe as his lowest point in Vietnam, and after surviving intense beatings and two suicide attempts, he signed a "confession" to war crimes written by his captors.

"I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine," McCain wrote in a first-person account published in US News & World Report in May 1973.

McCain in captivity

In 2015, after McCain had criticized Trump, Trump was asked about McCain. Here is his answer:

Yes, the draft dodger who got five deferments because a podiatrist was doing a favor for Trump’s father said that McCain—WHO CHOSE TO STAY IN TERRIBLE CAPTIVITY RATHER THAN ABANDON HIS COMRADES—was not a hero.

But there was to be much more to the Trump-McCain saga. azcentral published a list of the various criticisms the two made of each other. When McCain defended Arizona’s Hispanic population against Trump’s ugly, racist lies, Trump responded:

July 11, 2015: Trump appeared at a rally at the Phoenix Convention Center. "We have incompetent politicians, not only the president," Trump told the crowd. "I mean, right here, in your own state, you have John McCain." The pro-Trump audience booed the mention of McCain's name. After the event, Trump hammered McCain some more. "I've supported John McCain, but he's very weak on immigration," Trump said. "If the right person runs against John McCain, he will lose."

July 16, 2015: The New Yorker published McCain's reaction to Trump's Arizona rally. “This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me,” McCain said in the interview. “Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.” Trump immediately fired back on Twitter, demanding that McCain apologize for the "crazies" remark and calling McCain a "dummy" for graduating last in his class at the U.S. Naval Academy. Trump called for McCain to be defeated in his primary.

There was a brief period of seeming reconciliation, but once Trump became president, hostilities flared again.

Feb. 9, 2017: After McCain criticized the White House for calling a raid on Yemen a success, noting a U.S. Navy SEAL died during the event, Trump attacked McCain on Twitter. He chided the senator for characterizing the raid as a failure, saying it only emboldens the enemy.

July 20, 2017: Just hours after announcing he had been diagnosed with brain cancer, McCain blasts Trump for his decision to end an Obama policy of offering CIA training for moderate Syrian rebels fighting the regime of Bashar Al-Assad.

"If these reports are true, the administration is playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin," McCain said in a statement.

July 27, 2017:McCain casts a dramatic "no" vote on the "skinny repeal" of the Affordable Care Act, providing the decisive vote that kept the law alive. The late-night vote brought an immediate, somewhat mild, reaction from Trump. But he would soon use numerous opportunities to diss McCain — usually without naming him — by calling out the senator's "thumbs-down" gesture that sank the bill.

This final act by McCain propelled Trump’s hatred of him to new depths. As McCain was dying of brain cancer, Trump increased his ugly personal attacks on him, urging crowds to boo and ridicule the dying national hero. Trump issued insincere statements wishing McCain the best, but the hypocrisy in them was evident. Trump continued to attack McCain even after McCain’s death, in a remarkable example of vindictiveness. Such attacks were often not well-received:

Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral, by the way. Trump later complained that he had not been thanked (!) for the funeral, an event which he had very little to do with and which did not require his permission.

And of course, while the rest of political Washington was mourning McCain’s death, Trump was playing golf and tweeting.

After John McCain’s death in 2018, Trump continued his ugly, petty, spiteful hate campaign, as we have seen already.  Trump’s obsession with McCain was such that Trump even resented the flags being at half staff for the fallen war hero. Trump’s almost infinite vindictiveness was also expressed in his childish insistence that the ship named after the late Senator’s father be hidden during Trump’s visit to Japan.

And although Trump denied ever calling John McCain a loser, he is on record as having done so.

Trump also called former President George H. W. Bush a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese during World War II.

McCain isn’t the only war-hero-turned-Republican-politician Trump is described as having attacked as a loser:

On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former president George H.W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II.

Again, the “I like people who weren’t captured” quote applies here. (Bush wasn’t captured; Trump’s comments suggest he also might not respect people being shot down.) A former senior administration official confirmed to The Post that Trump frequently derided soldiers who were captured and missing in action as “losers.”

Trump has repeatedly disrespected, insulted, harmed, and misused those who serve in our armed forces. One is reduced to listing his transgressions, as John Fugelsang was earlier this year. I’d like to elaborate on his list, and those of others.

ITEM: In 2016, Trump brutally insulted the parents of Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Donald J. Trump belittled the parents of a slain Muslim soldier who had strongly denounced Mr. Trump during the Democratic National Convention, saying that the soldier’s father had delivered the entire speech because his mother was not “allowed” to speak.

Mr. Trump’s comments, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that will air on Sunday, drew quick and widespread condemnation and amplified calls for Republican leaders to distance themselves from their presidential nominee. With his implication that the soldier’s mother had not spoken because of female subservience expected in some traditional strains of Islam, his comments also inflamed his hostilities with American Muslims.

Khizr Khan, the soldier’s father, lashed out at Mr. Trump in an interview on Saturday, saying his wife had not spoken at the convention because it was too painful for her to talk about her son’s death.

Mr. Trump, he said, “is devoid of feeling the pain of a mother who has sacrificed her son.”

ITEM: In 2016, Trump lied about having given $1 million to a veterans charity.  Media pressure was needed to make Trump actually donate money

ITEM: In 2016, Trump claimed to know more about ISIS than the generals.

ITEM: In October 2017, four U.S. soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger. There were serious errors made in the planning of the mission. (Strangely, there were not nine investigations into this tragedy, as there were about the Benghazi incident.) Trump couldn’t remember the name of one of the soldiers when he called the man’s widow, Myeshia Johnson. And naturally, he lied about it later.

"I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband's name, and that's what hurt me the most, because if my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risked his life for our country, why can't you remember his name?" said Johnson, who had known her husband since she was 6 years old.

"That's what made me upset and cry even more, because my husband was an awesome soldier."

After Myeshia Johnson's interview aired, Trump argued on Twitter today that he said La David Johnson's name "from the beginning" and "without hesitation."

Then Trump added insult to injury:

MIAMI (AP) — President Donald Trump told the widow of a soldier killed in an ambush in Niger that her husband “knew what he signed up for,” according to a Florida congresswoman who says she heard part of the conversation on speakerphone.

Rep. Frederica Wilson said she was in the car with Myeshia Johnson on Tuesday on the way to Miami International Airport to meet the body of Johnson’s husband, Sgt. La David Johnson, when Trump called.

When asked by Miami station WPLG if she indeed heard Trump say that she answered: “Yeah, he said that. To me, that is something that you can say in a conversation, but you shouldn’t say that to a grieving widow.” She added: “That’s so insensitive.”

ITEM: From 2018, via Independent:

The US Army has been abruptly discharging immigrant recruits and reservists who enlisted through a programme that promised them a path to citizenship, it has emerged.

Some of the recruits said they were given no reason for their discharge. Others, after pressing for an explanation, were told they were considered security risks because they have relatives abroad or because the Defence Department had not completed background checks on them…

It is unclear how many service members who enlisted through the immigrant recruitment programme have been thrown out of the army because of their status.

However, immigration lawyers said they were aware of more than 40 enlistees who have been expelled from the forces in recent weeks, jeopardising their futures in the US.

More than 5,000 immigrants were recruited into the programme in 2016, with an estimated 10,000 currently serving. Most enter the army, but some also go into other military branches.

You want a bet who was behind that? And Military Times added this:

As many as 11,800 currently serving in the U.S. military are dealing with a spouse or family member who is facing deportation, a national immigration advocacy group announced Friday.

Again, can you smell the stench of Stephen Miller?

ITEM: (From Ian Shapira, via Twitter):

Trump also gave speech in 2017 at one of most sacred gov spaces —  @CIA Memorial Wall at Agency HQ — but bragged [about] his TIME covers, raged against reporters, & never recalled sacrifices of operatives whose deaths are signified by black stars etched into the ivory marble wall.

ITEM:  Trump used American service personnel as a political prop in his racist “anti-Caravan” nonsense in 2018, causing them to miss a treasured brief holiday with their families:

...Trump on Tuesday said people should not feel bad for U.S. troops who are spending Thanksgiving at the southern border because they are “tough people” who are proud to defend the country.

"Don’t worry," Trump told reporters at the White House regarding the troops, adding, "these are tough people."

"You're worried about the Thanksgiving holiday for them, they're so proud to be representing our country on the border," he said.

ITEM: In November 2018 TRUMP CANCELED HIS VISIT to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial near Paris, a visit meant to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War.

He canceled because it was raining. (The cemetery was only about an hour away by car if Trump didn’t want to fly there.)  Trump’s decision was not well-received:

Saturday's rainout of President Donald Trump's visit to a World War I cemetery is drawing catcalls from critics, including Winston Churchill's grandson.

"They died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate Donald Trump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to The Fallen," said Nicholas Soames, Churchill's grandson and a member of British Parliament.

The White House said it canceled Trump's trip to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial near Paris "due to scheduling and logistical difficulties caused by the weather."

Despite the rain, an American delegation led by Chief of Staff General John Kelly and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford still attended the event.

Critics pointed out world leaders like Emmanuel Macron of France, Angela Merkel of Germany, and Justin Trudeau of Canada managed to attend events Saturday despite the rain.

This is the cemetery that Trump said was full of “losers”. Can you imagine—CAN YOU IMAGINE—what Fox “News” and the rest of the Radical Right propaganda machine would have said had Barack Obama done that?

ITEM: On 12 November 2018 Trump blew off the traditional trip to Arlington National Cemetery to mark Veterans Day. The excuse again? Light rain. Trump didn’t want to look disheveled.

But that doesn’t mean Trump was idle. No, no! He kept busy:

Instead of spending his Monday marking Veterans Day, Trump has instead been tweeting conspiracy theories about the midterm elections, baselessly claiming that Democrats are forging ballots in a closely watched Florida recount.

That’s right, folks! He spent the day tweeting. AGAIN: Can you imagine the uproar if Barack Obama had done that?

ITEM: On Thanksgiving 2018, Trump called deployed American troops to express how thankful he was for himself:

The US president called American troops deployed overseas and took the opportunity to congratulate himself on what a great job he had done in running the country so far.

He told them that “the country is so much stronger” now that he is in office - so much so that “people don’t believe it".

When asked what he was thankful for, he said "his family", but added: “I made a tremendous difference in this country.

ITEM: In December 2018, the Trump Administration proposed cutting Veterans benefits:

A newly released report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has once again made several suggestions on reducing the national budget, and some of the budget cuts would affect over 240,000 disabled veterans.  According to many budget pundits, it appears the cuts will take place starting in 2020.

  

The new CBO report proposes dropping over 240,000 disabled veterans from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Individual Unemployability (IU) compensation program by 2020.  The cuts could save $47.6 billion in the next 10 years.

ITEM: Trump called U.S. generals “dopes” and “babies”:

At a briefing in 2017, U.S. military leaders were attempting to educate Trump on the basics of foreign and defense policy in various areas of the world. Among those present were Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. At one point Trump erupted:
 

“I want to win,” he said. “We don’t win any wars anymore . . . We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we’re not winning anymore.”

Trump by now was in one of his rages. He was so angry that he wasn’t taking many breaths. All morning, he had been coarse and cavalier, but the next several things he bellowed went beyond that description. They stunned nearly everyone in the room, and some vowed that they would never repeat them. Indeed, they have not been reported until now.

“I wouldn’t go to war with you people,” Trump told the assembled brass.

Addressing the room, the commander in chief barked, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

For a president known for verbiage he euphemistically called “locker room talk,” this was the gravest insult he could have delivered to these people, in this sacred space. The flag officers in the room were shocked. Some staff began looking down at their papers, rearranging folders, almost wishing themselves out of the room. A few considered walking out. They tried not to reveal their revulsion on their faces, but questions raced through their minds. “How does the commander in chief say that?” one thought. “What would our worst adversaries think if they knew he said this?”

We have already seen in Trump a portrait of an ignorant, selfish, draft-dodging coward with delusions of grandeur, a walking cancerous tumor of a human being who disrespected those who showed genuine heroism and competence. In our final installment, we will address the worst of Trump’s lies and some of the very worst of his actions.

TRUMP LIE: That he “rebuilt” a “depleted” military. Trump repeatedly has asserted that he “rebuilt” the military at a cost of $2.5 trillion, primarily invested in new equipment.

Politifact is on the case:

The Pentagon spent roughly $419 billion on procurement through the first three fiscal years of Trump’s presidency, and Congress appropriated about $143.5 billion more in the spending bill Trump signed for the 2020 fiscal year, bringing that total to about $562.5 billion.

The rest of the defense dollars over the last four years have been directed toward research and development, military personnel, and operation and maintenance costs, among other things.

Experts also noted that the bulk of the $2.5 trillion would have been spent anyway, regardless of who was president. (My emphasis)

"Most of that money was going to be spent under Obama," said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. "Trump’s net increases have been about $100 billion each year, or $400 billion total compared with earlier expectations."

The administration’s scaled-up defense spending has helped make troops and equipment more ready for combat, O’Hanlon said. But overall, Trump’s claim of a total rebuild is "hyperbole."

"Most weapons are the same as before," O’Hanlon said. "There is more continuity than change in defense policy from Obama to Trump."

FactCheck.org is on the case as well:

At times, [Trump] mentions the figure for the defense budgets without stipulating what specifically the money bought. “I’ve rebuilt our military. I spent two and a half trillion dollars. Nobody else did,” he told Fox News on June 11. (As we explained, Obama did indeed approve budgets totaling more than that.)

But other times, he has made the false claim about all of the funding going for equipment, or “new planes, ships, submarines, tanks, missiles, rockets — anything you can think of.”

Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told us when Trump has claimed $2-plus trillion was spent on military equipment, that’s “absolutely untrue.”

“What we spend on military equipment is a fraction of the defense budget,” Harrison said.

The Washington Post weighs in, too.

There have been times when President Trump has uttered a talking point so silly that we simply have tossed it into our database of Trump’s false and misleading claims. But then it keeps coming back, like a zombie, usually during the president’s campaign rallies…

But now the president actually used this misleading claim — that he has invested more than $2 trillion in the military — in a commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. So here’s a quick fact check and a Pinocchio rating…

The president is exaggerating his “investment” in the military, especially when he suggests that he has spent more than $2 trillion on new equipment. It’s a good thing that he not using a completely invented number, but we hope we’re not grading on a Trump curve. He earns Three — that’s with a T — Pinocchios.

TRUMP LIE: The military was “out of ammunition” when he took office.

Vox has the goods:

“When I took over our military, we did not have ammunition,” Trump said. “I was told by a top general, maybe the top of them all, ‘Sir, I’m sorry sir, we don’t have ammunition.’ I said, I will never let that happen to another president.”… [A “Sir” story. Trump is famous for them.]

In reality, the United States spent $611 billion on the military in 2016. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), a veteran who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and was first elected to Congress in 2016, noted Trump’s comments were “not true.”

“I get briefings as a member of the House Armed Services Committee on our munitions stockpile all over the world,” Gallego tweeted. “We have never run out of ammunition.”

There were some shortages. But the reason for them is interesting:

According to military leaders, there was a shortfall in certain kinds of munitions, particularly precision-guided bombs, late in the Obama presidency and early in the Trump presidency -- after the US used tens of thousands of these munitions in the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Obama administration Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in February 2016: "We've recently been hitting ISIL with so many GPS-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets that we are starting to run low on the ones that we use against terrorists the most. So we're investing $1.8 billion in (fiscal year 2017) to buy over 45,000 more of them."

In other words, Obama was raining so much hell down on ISIS that we were beginning to run low a little bit.

TRUMP LIE: That he gave the military their first pay raise in years.

From Military Times:

“You haven’t gotten [a raise] in more than 10 years. More than 10 years!” he told a crowd of applauding service members during his remarks at Al Asad Air Base in Iraq on Wednesday. “And we got you a big one. I got you a big one.”

Trump has repeatedly claimed that troops hadn’t seen a pay raise during President Barack Obama’s time in the White House. In fact, troops have seen a pay raise of at least 1 percent every year for more than 30 years. [My emphasis.]

The president also appeared to claim he pushed for a 10 percent pay raise in 2019, even though the actual rate his administration publicly supported and eventually got approved was only 2.6 percent.

“[People said] we could make it 3 percent. We could make it 2 percent. We could make it 4 percent," he told the troops. “I said, ‘No, make it 10 percent. Make it more than 10 percent.’ Because it’s been a long time. It’s been more than 10 years. That’s a long time.”

The 2018 military pay raise, approved in Trump’s first year in office, was 2.4 percent. It was the largest the military had seen in eight years, but followed a federal formula matching the expected rise in civilian sector wages for the year.

TRUMP LIE: That he pushed the Veterans Choice Act.

The AP weighs in:

Trump said he passed a private-sector health care program, Veterans Choice, after failed attempts by past presidents for the last “45 years.” That’s not true. The Choice program, which allows veterans to see doctors outside the government-run VA system at taxpayer expense, was first passed in 2014 under President Barack Obama.

Trump’s VA secretary, Robert Wilkie, also is distorting the facts. Faulting previous “bad leadership” at VA, Wilkie suggested it was his own efforts that improved waiting times at VA medical centers and brought new offerings of same-day mental health service. The problem: The study cited by Wilkie on wait times covers the period from 2014 to 2017, before Wilkie took the helm as VA secretary. Same-day mental health services at VA were started during the Obama administration.

FACT: JOHN McCAIN AND BERNIE SANDERS PUSHED FOR THE LEGISLATION. TRUMP HAS LIED ABOUT THIS MORE THAN 150 TIMES.

It’s just disgusting.

Trump uses the military like a prop. His ludicrous proposal for a military parade and his use of the military for his Fourth of July celebration are prime examples, but there are others, as laid out in this Op-Ed, The Military is Not a Political Prop. NOTE: Trump did not want wounded and disabled veterans at his parades. “Nobody wants to see that”, Trump reportedly said.

Now, on to the final atrocities.

Trump betrayed the Kurds and put our troops at risk.

The Kurds were our loyal allies in fighting ISIS, taking thousands of casualties in the process. Trump’s precipitate action in withdrawing 1,000 U.S. personnel from Syria and acceding to Turkey’s anti-Kurdish demands was a shocking betrayal.

This PBS Account, ‘Trump betrayed us’: Fleeing Kurds condemn U.S. decision to leave Syria is eye-opening.

American bases were abandoned to the Russians. Insider summarized the impact of this:

• When Trump ordered US troops to abandon the Kurds in Northern Syria, Turkish forces stormed the newly unprotected area.
• Within days of the Americans abandoning their bases, "reporters" from the Russian defence ministry's TV channel began broadcasting from there.
• This is an intelligence (and propaganda) gift to Russia.
• Moscow will carefully examine the abandoned bases for communications infrastructure, construction materials and techniques, and battlefield medical equipment.
• Each new piece of knowledge will improve their understanding of Western tactics, techniques and operations, helping to develop countermeasures for future conflicts.

From The Washington Post’s David Ignatius:

At a gathering last Saturday night of military and intelligence veterans, one topic shrouded the room: President Trump’s decision to abandon Kurdish fighters in Syria who had fought and died to help America destroy the Islamic State.

“It’s a dagger to the heart to walk away from people who shed blood for us,” one former top CIA official who attended the black-tie dinner told me later. A retired four-star general who was there said the same thing: Trump’s retreat was an “unsound, morally indefensible act” and a “disgrace” to America and the soldiers who serve this country.

This sense of anguish was pervasive among those attending the event, several attendees said. It was an annual dinner honoring the Office of Strategic Services, the secret World War II commando group that was a forerunner of today’s CIA and Special Operations forces. The event celebrated the military alliances that have always been at the center of American power. It was a bitter anniversary this year.

The Turks brutally attacked the Kurds, attacks which included the use of white phosphorous weapons. I was going to include a video of a Kurdish child screaming in agony after having been subjected to such an attack. I couldn’t bear to look at it for very long. It’s too terrible.

How can ANYONE support this bastard?

From CNN:

A wide range of American military personnel and defense officials are expressing a deep sense of frustration and anger at the Trump administration's refusal to support Syrian Kurds facing a Turkish military assault, over half a dozen US military and defense officials have told CNN.

Several US military and defense officials, including personnel deployed to Syria, expressed dismay at how the Trump administration has handled the situation.

One US official said it is well known that some senior US military officials are livid at how the Kurds have been treated given their role in helping the US fight ISIS.

Another senior American defense official told CNN that Trump's failure to more forcefully oppose the invasion or do anything to stop the attacks on the Kurds meant Trump had given Turkey a green light, despite the administration's public stance that it had consistently opposed the operation.

Under pressure, Trump supported sanctions against Turkey. But the terrible damage was done.

TRUMP WILL BETRAY ANYONE.

Trump has done NOTHING about the fact that Vladimir Putin has put bounties on the heads of our soldiers in Afghanistan

Let me first quote our own Mark Sumner:

TRUMP IS STILL OVERLOOKING RUSSIA’S OFFER OF BOUNTIES FOR THE MURDER OF U.S. TROOPS

Trump isn’t just dishonoring fallen U.S. soldiers, he’s helping to see that more soldiers get killed by refusing to address the fact that Russia is paying bounties for the murder of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It’s clear that Trump was full aware of what was going on, it’s also clear that he just does not care. Just so long as any troops wounded by Russia don’t come back wounded and make his parades unsightly. After all, they knew what they signed up for.

There are so many other items that could be mentioned. The vile treatment of the Vindman brothers for their acts of conscience in exposing Trump’s criminality is one example. Trump’s callous dismissal of the suffering of those with traumatic brain injuries would be another. But in the end, let’s listen to General James Mattis, who was Trump’s first Defense Secretary. Writing in the period of civil unrest this summer, Mattis said:

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis writes. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”

He goes on to contrast the American ethos of unity with Nazi ideology. “Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that ‘The Nazi slogan for destroying us … was “Divide and Conquer.” Our American answer is “In Union there is Strength.”’ We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.”

FOR FURTHER READING: Trump says he supports the troops. His record suggests otherwise.

Trump is the most anti-military president we’ve had — and he doesn’t even know it

Another list with many items I didn’t have time to include.

ADDENDUM:

@JohnFugelsang

(1). Here's a thread for anyone who's  been conned into believing Donald Trump cares about the US military or our troops.

-Faked a disability 5 times to avoid a war he didn't oppose
-5 non-rich guys went to Vietnam in his place
-Tried to kick homeless vets off 5th Ave

(2)
-Stole from vets via his fraud online U
-Lied about donating $1 million to veterans' nonprofits
-Said he'd make troops commit war crimes
-Pardoned a guy who committed war crimes
-Falsely claimed he signed Vets' Choice into law
-Insulted POWs
-Insulted Gold Star Families
(3)
-Fined for misusing funds from 2016 Vets fundraiser
-Called Generals "dopes & babies"
-Falsely accused US service members of stealing funds for Iraqi reconstruction
-Deployed 5,600 soldiers to the border in a midterm election stunt

(4)
-Personally insulted Generals Allen, Mattis, Kelly, Powell, McChrystal; Purple Heart recipients Mueller & Vindman, & Admiral McRaven
-lied about donating $6 million to veterans groups in 2016
-Sided with Putin against all branches of military intelligence

(5)
-Blew off Veterans Day cemetery ceremony in France bc it was raining.
-What he said to Myeshia Johnson, widow of ambushed Sgt. La David Johnson. Not gonna repeat it.
-He's trying to cut SNAP. Do you understand how much that hurts military families & vets?

(6)
-His budget seeks to cut medicaid. Do you understand how much this hurts military families & vets?
-Froze pay for all Fed agencies via Executive Order - Fed workforce is 31% veteran, approx 623k vets
-Undid regulations on predatory lenders who target military members

(7)
-He's trying to destroy the Post Office, which employs thousands of veterans
-Declared a fake national emergency to divert billions from the Pentagon to fund a wall he lied that Mexico would pay for
-Downplayed & trivialized troops w/traumatic brain injuries in Jan 2020

(8)
-Insulted troops with PTSD
-Used the national guard to tear gas US protestors so he could be photographed w/an upside down bible
-Forced West Point cadets to travel back for graduation during a plague, endangering their health & the health of their families, for a photo-op

(9)
-Said 26,000 military sexual assaults were to be 'expected' bc America lets women serve
-announced that transgender troops could no longer serve, via a tweet, without informing the Pentagon.
-Invited the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11

(10)
-claimed, stupidly, that his military budget made up for his lack of military experience
-Told wife #2 he'd disown their daughter if she entered the service
-remember his fake 'veterans hotline?'

(11)
-Lied to US troops in Iraq that he'd given them their 1st pay raise in over a decade
-Trump Institute fired a vet for 'absences' after he was deployed to Afghanistan
-Claimed if an armored Humvee was hit by an IED, soldiers "go for a little ride upward & they come down."

(12)
-blamed military leaders for the deadly failed Yemen mission he approved
-He can't stop defending the Confederacy
-said his expensive prep school gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”

(13)
-attacked Navy Captain Crozier, who sounded COVID alarm for his sick sailors
-used military against peaceful protests by citizens of color
-Had gov't give hydroxychloroquine to 1300 vets w/COVID-19 despite evidence it was dangerous
-didn't know what happened at Pearl Harbor

(14)
-pulled out of Syria w/no notice, abandoning US allies
-Russia posted footage of Syrian base, built by US, that they now own
-exploited 4 murdered Americans in #Benghazi for crass political purposes, after his own party had cleared the Obama WH in multiple investigations

(15)
-He keeps trying to destroy NATO
-BC of his govt shutdown, members of US military worked w/out pay for the 1st time
-No Other President Would Have Survived Defrauding Veterans’ Charities

(16)
-Said in 2018 that he was too busy to visit the troops: "I don’t think it’s overly necessary"
-Ordered Navy to Strip Medals From Prosecutors in Eddie Gallagher's War Crimes Trial, even though Gallagher was extremely guilty.

(17)
Now this.  Read it to a #maga or #kag loved one

-Putin is financing the murder of our troops & Trump can't stop siding with him.
-Russia bought the murder of our soldiers.
-Trump has known for months and has chosen to say and do NOTHING about it.

(18)
The Pentagon & cabinet presented him with many options:
-a diplomatic complaint to Moscow
-a demand that they stop offering bounties for murder of US troops stop
-an escalating series of sanctions

Trump has refused to say or do anything.

(19)

Trump stood in front of the West Point graduates after forcing their families to risk their health.

He knew that Putin, who owns his debt via Deutsche Bank, was paying Islamic militants for murdering US troops.

He gave his speech and did nothing.

(20)
Well, that's not actually fair.
Trump did a few things after learning Putin was paying for dead US troops in Afghanistan.

He lobbied other countries for Russia to be let back into the G7.

He also talked to Putin June 1.  
Days later he signed off on a plan....

(21)
...to permanently withdraw up to 1/3 of the approx 34k U.S. troops currently based in Germany.  

Which is part of Putin's dream of dismantling NATO.

DT never told Germany he was going to do this.

Oh, and in May he withdrew from the Open Skies treaty, like Putin wanted.

(22)
Trump did Putin's bidding in Syria this year.

He abandoned our Kurdish allies to slaughter.

They fought by our side and died bc they trusted our leadership.

He then handed over a US military base in Syria to Russian soldiers, to the delight of Russian news media

(23)
Remember Helsinki?
He groveled before Putin & asserted that Russia didn't interfere in the US election?

And he trusts Vlad over all US military intelligence?

"He just said it's not Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be"

(24)
Then, days later, said he wasn't being servile to Putin and we all just didn't understand what he said?

"I realized that there is a need for some clarification...The sentence should have been...'I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia.'"

(25)
Well in May 2020, on a phone call with V/Putin, Trump told him the investigation into Russian interference in the  election was a "hoax."

Again, he chose Putin over US military intelligence.

He had known about Putin's bounty on the heads of US troops for almost 2 months.

(26)
But even during the period where DT officially accepted the Russian attack on our election he:

-still wouldn't hold them accountable
-refused to take any action on Russian interference in our next election.
-turned a blind eye to the growing Russian cyber action in the U.S.

(27)
But this thread isn't about Putin; or Trump's corruption, racism, ignorance, his record of sexual assaults, his incompetence, or the vast amount of things he's been wrong about.

This is just about his despicable treatment of the US Armed Forces

(28)
-He said "our military is a joke" in a 2016 debate w/HRC
-He fired Lt Col Vindman for doing his duty
-He fired Vindman's brother for being Vindman's brother
-Plans to de-fund Stars & Stripes
-He made our military stand down & watch allies be slaughtered & our base overrun

(29)
-Had military pit stops in Ireland go hours out of their way to stay at his resort so our tax$ would be pumped into his property
-His stupid wall-based 2017 govt shutdown hurt vets & made veteran memorials unavailable to public.
-He bloody saluted a North Korean general

But there's no greater proof of his indifference to the troops he uses as props than what happened in Niger.

On 10/4/17 4 US service members died in Niger.

It took Trump 12 days to comment publicly on the soldiers’ deaths.
And when he was finally asked about the deaths...

(30)

...at a press conference, he deflected by falsely accusing President Obama of never calling the families of soldiers killed in the line of duty.

This was a really dumb lie, but debunking the lie became a bigger media narrative than why those men died, or why Trump lied.

(31)

Then the commander-in-chief passed the buck & blamed  generals for the 4 dead soldiers.

He also referred to the US armed forces as "my military."

(32)

@SenJohnMcCain
demanded transparency, hearings and answers on Niger.  

He's not around now.

And then there's Trump's other Benghazi, in Yemen.

(33)
A brutally tragic raid that killed 3 special forces members & 30 civilians, 10 of whom were women & children.

It was a mission Obama had refused to approve.
Trump approved it over dinner w/Bannon & Jared.

He didn't show up in the Situation Room.

(34)
Most of us didn't realize we were at war in Yemen.
Because we aren't. Our troops are used as proxies for Saudi Arabia.

William Owens, father of slain Chief Petty Officer William Owens refused to meet w/Trump at Dover after his son's death.

(37)
Trump is a confidence artist.    He conned contractors, casino bondholders, Trump U students, Trump Foundation Donors, 3 wives, and, in 2016, 62 million easy marks.

He says what they want to hear and he is given blind obedience & loyalty.   Don't let it make you crazy.

(38)
I love my conservative friends & loved ones.  But in lifetime I've seen them be really wrong about:

-Nixon
-Vietnam
-Reaganomics
-AIDS
-LGBT rights
-Iran Contra
-Impeaching Clinton
-Bush's tax plan economics
-Iraq WMDs
-being greeted as liberators
-Sarah Palin
-Drug War
(39)
-Obama's birth certificate
-that Obamacare had death panels
-that Obamacare would add to the deficit
-that Trump gave a damn act the military.

That's not to say Dems haven't been wrong ab things too.  

But being wrong is different from being destructive and evil.

(40)

Never forget how Trump clowned around during the National Anthem before the 2020 superbowl.  

He didn't know he was being filmed and it's all you need to know about him.    Google it if you haven't seen the video.  

Kaepernick never deliberately mocked the anthem.

(41)
Over 125k Americans dead from virus & he's doing nothing.

Russia paying bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan & he's doing nothing.

Police killing unarmed ppl has caused massive protests & he won't say 'racism' & praises monuments to a White Supremacist enemy of the USA.
·
(42)

Putin denies it.   Whose side do you think Trump will take?